


gotta get to the bottom of this

by hemlock_sunset



Category: Let's Play Cyberpunk Red - Polygon (Web Series)
Genre: A lot of cursing, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Cults, Disabled Character, Gen, Is this enough tags?, Kidnapping, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Temporary Character Death, a fic with plot!, and original cults, because cyberpunk, could be read as vang0chainz if you wear shippers goggles, netrunning is like, original characters are just to add some Spice and Flavor to the world, original corporations, really hard, they all care about each other very very much but burger's the only one who'll admit it, why does cyberpunk have SO MUCH LORE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:55:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25099510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hemlock_sunset/pseuds/hemlock_sunset
Summary: After the events of Ring Box, Dasha wants to relax. Shopping's good for you! Makes you happy!Apparently, she can't get away from work.(Alternately: The gang take down a cyber-cult.)NOTICE: This work is complete! Because of the recent tag shift, I'll keep it up under the Polygon/McElroy RPF tag for another week or so before transitioning fully over to the Let's Play Cyberpunk Red tag. Thank you for your patience!
Relationships: Dapper Dasha & Burger Chainz, Dapper Dasha & Vang0 Bang0, Vang0 Bang0 & Burger Chainz, Vang0 Bang0 & Burger Chainz & Dapper Dasha
Comments: 29
Kudos: 44





	1. dasha would like to have one second to relax, please

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go, folks! I promise subsequent chapters will be longer, but you gotta set up the conflict somehow. (Also this first chap lowkey sucks but I swear the second one is coming out a lot better!)
> 
> Please drop a kudos and/or a comment! They make my day and give me that good, good validation we fanfic writers all crave.

Dasha’s having a pretty good day.

She’s got money, now, from their most recent job with Harp Co and M House. She’s pretty excited at how well they handled it- not a single person died! That they know of, anyway! (Not that she cares about collateral damage, but it’s easier when there isn’t paperwork to fill out and people asking her to find the people she’s “disappeared.” Talk about awkward.) 

She found a new outfit of Winona’s to replicate, that morning, and this afternoon when browsing the wares of her favorite shop she found a belt that would go perfectly with it. Even better, it’s got technology to save people from long drops, which’ll certainly come in handy the next time she hangs out with these chucklefucks. She hates to admit it, but they work well together; they’re a cohesive team that balances each other out. That had crystallized on their last mission- she’d had to remind them that HarpCo would probably kill them if they tried to attack HarpCo employees, but Vang0 did a good job of taking them out of the “dead body scheme” mindset and Burger reminded them that mayhaps blaming jumptrash dot net was a bad plan. She wouldn’t admit it at gunpoint, but… she’d probably be a lot worse off without them. 

Doesn’t mean they aren’t morons, though.

She’s checking out when her agent bings a couple times, and she figures she’ll glance at it after she buys the belt; she swipes her RFID chip past the scanner and sweeps out of the shop, agent still binging incessantly. Huh. Must be big, if it won’t stop. Probably Lionel. She glances at it.

It’s not Lionel. Well, it  _ is  _ Lionel, or at least about him, but it’s not  _ from  _ Lionel. It’s from another fixer she knows- Honeybee- who’s sent her approximately a million messages. Well, it’s four, really, but they could definitely have been summarized in one. 

HB:  _ have you seen lionel recently?  _

HB:  _ Nobody can find him _

HB:  _ dasha, pick up your agent _

HB:  _ dash. _

DD:  _ …Is he missing? _

HB:  _ dunno. Jugz thinks he’s gone for good but i feel like that’s wrong somehow. _

DD:  _ Have you asked Cat? _

HB:  _ alleycat’s retired, remember? Too in debt to netwatch _

DD:  _ Fine. I’m on it, but you owe me one. _

HB:  _ deal _

She worries at her lower lip with her teeth as she walks briskly through Night City. She knows where Burger is, of course; she might need him for this one. Vang0, too. Guess they’re getting the gang back together, huh? 

Vang0 doesn’t pick up, but he’s live on stream, so she’s not worried. Instead, she goes to Burger’s truck and leans against the window, knocking once or twice sharply against the cool glass. Burger is in the front seat, chewing on kibble. He could probably afford some better food at a corner stop, now, or even buy himself an apartment, but he says he likes living in his van. Being Streetscum without being Streetscum, apparently. He looks up when she knocks, revealing behind him in the passenger seat Vang0 Bang0, with a primitive-looking cell phone in one hand. Figures. He seems pretty into old tech.

“What’s up, Dash?” he asks, rolling down the window. “Thought you’d gone off shoppin’. Want some kibble?”   
  


“No thanks,” she says, leaning her head in. “You boys remember Lionel?”

“Sup, Dasha,” Vang0 puts in, looking up for the first time and making his now-routine hand signs. His right eye has a red dot visibly blinking inside the blue of his iris- he’s still recording. “Vang0 Bang0 here, uh, just- streamin’ some mobile games. Lionel was the fixer who called you for Hypo.”

“Yeaaaaah,” she says. She draws the word out, but carries on with the sentence rapidly. “So- he might’ve gone missing. We gotta find him.”

She wouldn’t admit it at gunpoint, but  _ god, _ she’s thankful that they don’t ask questions, because she doesn’t have answers. Vang0 just nods firmly and Burger says, “Do we gotta timeframe?”   
  


“As soon as possible, I’d imagine?” Dasha says. “I don’t know much about the situation.”

“Well, uh, we should- we should probably find his last known location, right?” Vang0 suggests. The blinky red light turns off abruptly and he fiddles with his agent, probably using some tracking app or software. She can never keep up with what the netrunners are using these days. Technology moves too fast for that.

Burger unlocks the back door of the van and she slides in, watching Vang0 swipe up to slide something- a video, she can tell now- from his agent to his laptop and fullscreen it, then scrub the film back. It’s a camera feed of a section of the city, near Hypo’s clinic; the view over the freeway and of the surrounding couple blocks. He double-speeds the video, scrolling through; Dasha watches over his right shoulder as Burger leans over his left. She makes a quick perception check on the video; nothing seems out of place to her. Vang0 makes a disinterested noise and swipes over to a new feed. “We might be here for, uh, a while, guys.”

They watch with vague disinterest as cars come and go. In number three, they watch a Trauma Team vehicle zip down the sidewalk; in the seventh, someone jaywalks and bangs on the hood of a passing car with their open palm. Nothing looks out of place until the fifteenth feed set, where Burger slams his fist on the pause button and Vang0 startles like a cat, jumping out of his seat and everything. 

“Look there,” Burger points out with a square finger. It’s blurry, but it’s there, someone being pulled by the arm into the back of a van. Vang0 clicks on several settings, zooms and enhances as much as he can; it’s still pixelated, but with the tech jumps 2045 has brought with it, Dasha can definitely recognize his electric blue hair and near-iconic yellow boots. She can’t make out the face of who’s pulling him in; they’re inside the van, one hand on Lionel’s upper arm.

“That’s him, all right,” she confirms. Vang0 scrolls around to see if any of the passersby notice; they don’t seem to, or maybe they don’t care. People go missing all the time. It’s Night City.

“What’s on the van?” Burger asks. It’s a question Dasha hasn’t even thought of yet- she reminds herself to give Burger more credit sometimes. 

“Can’t tell yet,” Vang0 mutters, unpausing the footage and watching the van zoom off. He flips to another video set, to another timestamp- sure enough, the van drives through there. Dasha points it out, this time- “What’s that?” Vang0 pauses the video, then zooms and enhances the feed to show an intricate design on the side of the van.

“Looks like a skull,” Burger says. “Made of wires. Or maybe worms. It could be worms!”

“Creepy,” Vang0 comments. “What are worms?”

“Vang0, how do you not know what worms are?!,” Burger exclaims, and proceeds to go on a rant about how earthworms are essential to making the ground fertile or some farming shit like that. 

Dasha, in the meantime, takes it upon herself to look up the symbol, then, because apparently her teammates are trash and useless at staying on task. Her tech roll comes up pretty okay, but she still resigns herself to the irritation of flicking through five pages of Zoogle to figure out the solution. 


	2. vang0's ready to roll

“Look at this,” Dasha says, pushing her laptop into Vang0’s face. He squints for a second- her screen is too dark for his liking- and glances at the obscure-looking blog. It’s done in pastel pink with small black text and yellow sparkles. Talks about a cult by the name of “Cyberpsych Brotherhood.”

“Dasha, you think this is a  _ cult? _ ” Vang0 says. “In 2045? A cult? Those were out of style by 2023! Besides, that name is so incredibly  _ gauche- _ ”

“Hang on, what?” Burger asks, leaning over Vang0 to get a look. Dasha turns her screen to him; Vango watches his one eye read the webpage ever-so-slowly.

“That website’s, like, 300 years old, anyway,” Vang0 points out. “Nobody uses pastels anymore. Or calls themselves ‘Wiccan.’ Or says ‘uwu stay safe out there my smol beans.’”

“32 years old,” Dasha says as Burger adds, “I like pastels.”   
  


Vang0 stares at Burger incredulously. “You like  _ pastels? _ ”

“Sure,” he shrugs. Vang0 can’t  _ believe _ he’s friends(? Jury’s still out on that one) with this unfashionable punk.

“Vang0, haven’t you worn pastels?” Dasha points out.

“Yeah,  _ pastel pink with glitter. _ And it was a see-through shirt and you KNOW those are popular.”

“But aren’t those just-”

“Anyway,” Dasha says, cutting into Burger’s protest, “you’re right that it looks ancient but it’s the only thing on the internet about them and besides, aren’t cults basically ancient anyway?”

“Yeah, which is why it’s so improbable that it’s  _ actually a cult- _ ” Vang0 argues, but Burger talks over him.

“Come on, it’s not like we’re doing anything today, Vang0.”

He tries to protest that  _ yeah, actually _ ,  _ he was about to stream some Overwatch 2,  _ but Burger’s already pulling the van out of the parking spot, boat swinging wildly behind him. “So we’re looking for a skull?”   
  
“Made of wires,” Dasha says. “Might not be super obvious.” She clicks around on her agent, and Vang0 follows suit; he does have access to some search engines with…  _ less _ than savory frequenters, but he checks Jumptrash first because he’s not a fucking  _ traitor _ . At first, he doesn’t get any search results, but after a second with the query “cpbh-” y’know, for the CyberPsych BrotherHood- there’s a ping. Hell yeah, good local expert roll. 

“Looking for cpbh meeting this week. Anyone know where?” in the personals section of the roleplay forums for an old comic series, written a few months ago. He scrolls down a little ways, and oh, shit- there’s just a whole ass address in plain text! He mentally fist pumps once or twice.

“Uh, good news, everybody- ya boy, Vang0 Bang0’s got an address. It’s 8262 Glass Rd?” 

Burger turns on the left blinker and makes an abrupt turn to redirect them. Dasha pats him on the back the way she does to Burger so often; he’s fairly certain it means pride of some sort, but his human perception rolls have always been shit.

“And- and can I just say that ‘the cyberstrike boys’ is the evilest name I’ve ever heard for a cult?” Burger says after a second.

“I think it’s The Cyberpsych Brotherhood,” Dasha says, “which is arguably eviler.”

“It’s- it’s all a cult,” Vang0 sighs. This is dumb. Really, he doesn’t even want to concede the point that it’s a  _ cult _ since he was  _ pretty sure _ the last one was eradicated in 2023 with the advent of the Pacifica Corporation, but who knows? Maybe they made new ones during the Time of the Red. Those types are all about the apocalypse, and it sure fuckin’ looked apocalyptic. 

“Yeah, but some cults are eviler-sounding than others! Some of em have good  _ branding,  _ yanno? And you’re like, ‘I wouldn’t join a cult, but if I did that’s the cult I’d join! _ ’ _ ”

Vang0 considers this a moment. “No, y’know what, that’s fair enough.”

“What the - no??? It isn’t???” Dasha exclaims from the backseat. 

“Well, wouldja- wouldja rather join a cult that has a cool and good name-”

“Or a cult with a shitty name?” Vang0 cuts in. 

“I’d rather join neither, thanks! Like, why are we even  _ talking  _ about joining cults, that’s not even on the table right now!”

“Well, it’s a hypothetical!” Burger exclaims, gesturing at Dasha in the back mirror and almost crashing them into the black car in front of them.

“Eyes on the road!” Dasha and Vang0 chorus loudly.

-

They find the place they’re supposed to be easy enough. It’s a tall apartment complex, and Vang0 chews on his tongue as he hacks into the buzzer system and lets them in. When he jacks into the buzzer system, he gets a glimpse of the Net- it’s  _ crazy  _ in here, mostly normal until the basement, where it lights up nearly gold with the sheer amount of  _ stuff. _ At least he’s not planning to netrun for this mish. 

They go down the elevator in near-silence. Everyone’s tense; they know they’re about to step into a fight. Dasha fingers her heavy pistol carefully; Burger cracks his fingers- only his thumbs, though- and pulls Hatchet, his shotgun, from his back. For Vang0’s part, he debates back and forth in his head about which gun to use before taking his own heavy pistol. It’s not as flashy as Dasha’s but it works just as well. He totally isn’t jealous of the gold on Dasha’s. Shut up.

Sure enough! When the doors open, they’re met by a group of people in robes-  _ what the fuck, it’s July, oh my god, how are you not dying- _ and a lot of books open. It looks like they’ve been having a pizza party; there’s a huge pizza covered in synthetic ham and cheese, half-eaten. All of this Vang0 registers with his cursory perception roll before he raises his gun and fires at the cultists. 

“Wait, I thought we were going to try and negotiate!” Dasha yells as their surprise round starts, but she lifts her gun anyway and starts firing on them. Burger brains the closest one to him with the butt of his shotgun and opens fire, too.

The seven-ish cultists dive for cover, other than the one who Burger hit, who lies motionless on the floor. One starts chanting, and the others follow suit. They’re worshipping something, but Vang0 doesn’t really care to find out; he shoots the light above them out, raining glass down on them, and that takes one out. Dasha puts some well-placed bullets into two more, and Burger unleashes a hail of bullets on the remaining three.

“Well, that was efficient,” Burger notes.

“And we killed six more people than we needed to!” Dasha exclaims. Vang0 nudges one of the downed bodies with the toe of his neon basketball shoe- it’s the one he hit with glass.

“I think this one’s alive,” he notes. “Hit their head hard on the way down but they’re breathing.”

“Five more people, then,” Dasha grumbles. “Which is STILL not a great number of people!”

“Well, I think that’s better than them killing three of us!” Burger offers.

“And- they were gonna die anyway in those cloaks. Looks astoundingly warm.”

“Wait, this one’s not dead. He has some heart shielding.” Dasha crouches to examine him further. “This guy’s got some heavy-duty fashionware on him. Lots of enhancement here.” 

They pick their way through the bloodstained room; Vang0 knows they’re supposed to be looking for Lionel, but his second perception check of the afternoon tells him there’s something more interesting- books lining the walls. He turns on his streamer eye and flashes his sign real quick before examining them further.  _ Real _ books, made with paper and leather bindings and intricate gold paint. He squints, picking one up- it’s heavier than he anticipated. It’s the first one he’s ever touched in person, he thinks.

“Dasha, Burger- uh- Vang0 Bang0-, these are real,” he says, flicking through the pages. It’s a remarkably new book for how outdated the entire concept of them is; it’s a book about the induction of cyberpsychosis.

“No shit?” Dasha pauses in her examination of the cultists. “Real books?”

“Real books,” Burger confirms from the other side of the room where he’s been clearing the room of debris. “Don’t know what half these words mean, but they’re real all right.”

“Someone here’s got money,” Dasha says, glancing at the sheer amount. “Boatloads of it.” 

Vang0 runs a quick perception check, searching specifically for any books that stand out as important-looking, and finds one open on the table that seems exceedingly worn and yellowed. He picks it up and flicks through it. It’s a sort of manifesto; talks about how cybernetics will allow them all to ascend to the next world. Written in 2011. “Hey, I- I, uh, found some info here- they, uh, worship cybernetics, ‘pparently. Like, uhh, a cult boostergang, if they intentionally tried to induce cyberpsychosis? Vang0 Bang0.”

“That tracks,” Dasha says. “Most of these guys just have flashy fashionware, but they look like they’ve got so much of it they could go psycho any minute. Does it have a ripperdoc name or anything?”

He leafs through. “No ripperdoc… I just- who has this kind of money?”

“Gotta be some exec,” Dasha says. “Someone big. Vang0, are you  _ streaming? _ ”

“Y-yep, I am,” he says, squinting to make out the small text. It’s so much  _ harder  _ when it’s not illuminated and moving directly in front of your eyes. 

“Nice,” Burger chimes in. “Hey, you think the cultists will mind if I steal pizza?”

“There’s glass in it!” Dasha exclaims. It’s already in Burger’s mouth. Vang0’s agent lights up as the chat starts freaking out about Burger eating glass.

Ah, social media.

He returns to the book, looking for any bit of information. The wheels in his head are already turning- there’s money in this cult, for sure, money enough to get massive amounts of cybernetic enhancements and  _ real books. _ Not local money, or they’d have splurged on real pizza with real cheese. The kind of money that- maybe he’s drawing wonky parallels at this point, but the same kind of money that would explain how he woke up in a warehouse, empty-minded and halfway to cyberpsychosis already with the sheer amount of discreet mods in him.

So he knows a couple of things- one, this is something  _ big.  _ Corp-level, even, if they have this kind of money to spend on a single near-minuscule basement room with seven cultists who are clearly not the leaders. Two, they probably have a zillion offshoots if they’ve been going since 2011, which- if Vang0 studied the right history- was  _ before nanotech. _ Three, this could be a lead.

_ This could be a lead. _

He turns off his stream pretty abruptly- it’s fine, they’re probably used to his sudden starts and stops, that’s chill- and leaves the room and gets in the elevator and heads up.

There’s already a plan forming in his head by the time he knows Burger and Dasha will have noticed he’s left. He just has to wait a little bit longer.

-

It’s four in the morning when Vang0 enacts the beginning of his plan.

Burger’s been sleeping in the boat, he knows; Keanu can defend himself if he needs to but the boat is pretty well unarmed. Vang0 unhitches the boat from the van with little to no trouble and climbs into Keanu.

“What can I do for you, master Vang0?” Keanu asks from the console. He ignores him, instead opening up the panel and going to work editing the tech in there. Burger’d given him access long ago. He feels a little bad, betraying his trust like this, but he’ll understand. Burger always forgives him. 

He disables the trackable sections of the GPS with the light of the guide he’s pulled up on his agent and then pulls the plug on external communications. Nobody can call the car now. For extra insurance, he turns his agent all the way off, opens it up, and discards the SIM card, then disconnects the wire that lets it continue tracking him when it’s off. He can reattach it later.

He starts up the car, next; he’s got some basic netrunning gear he bought after waking up in the warehouse, and he woke up with a tricked-out cyberlimb port, so that’ll be useful for this run. He hasn’t worn his virtuality goggles in weeks, but he puts them on; sets up his cyberlimb deck, and leans back. “Kee, take me out of the city.”

“Master Vang0, this is highly unadvisable, and-”

“Just- let’s go,” he says, snappier this time, and Keanu kicks into gear and starts driving away, leaving Burger and the boat behind. The NET overlay blinks into gear, full of the things hiding in the Night City NET, but he knows it’ll disappear once they get out of the city. Then he just has to look for another small portal or island  _ plastered  _ in files and data, the same way the one in the basement was.

As the van travels out of the city, Vang0 leans back. He doesn’t plan to be gone for long, anyway. He’s sure Burger will understand when he’s back in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Famous last words, Vang0. 
> 
> Leave a comment or kudos! They make me happy and give me that good good motivation I need in these quarantimes.


	3. burger rushes in

“What do you mean he’s gone?!” Dasha yells into Burger’s ear.

“I don’t know!” He’s pacing now around the boat and its broken hologram that Vang0 had promised to fix a week ago. Well, fat chance of that happening now, huh? He’s never felt dumber in his long, dumb life- he should’ve been more alert, should’ve woken up sooner, should’ve- “He just- I woke up and the van was gone and Vang0 was gone too! He’s totally offline, I pinged his agent like a million times.” 

“Why weren’t you sleeping in the van!?”

“Well, I thought Kee could take care of ‘imself, y’know, and I- the boat’s hologram isn’t working, so I figured I could keep an eye on the boat while Keanu keeps an eye on the van! I didn’t expect him to just _take a key off my belt_ and tell me to go back to sleep!”

“Why’d you even LET him take a key off your belt, Burger??”

“Because I was _tired_ and I wasn’t thinking straight!” He’s basically yelling now, he knows, and if he was back on the farm people’d be staring. Lucky for him, it’s Night City. Nobody gives a shit. Small victories; god, where the hell would Vang0 be? Fuck- _fuck-_ Vang0’s a goddamn adult. He shouldn’t be so- freaked out. Eventually, he blurts, “I trust him, okay, Dasha!”

“Yeah, well- trust _ed,_ Burger, seems to be the tense right now.” He recoils in shock, and she sighs even though she can’t see him (probably.) “Listen, okay, I’ll- I’ll get on it. I’ll go call someone up, I just- _fuck._ ”

“I know. I’m sorry, Dash,” he says, even though it’s not his fault. For some reason, people like it when you apologize for things that aren’t your fault. Was it his fault? He’s not sure. “I’ll look for him in his usual haunts.”

He locks the boat down and turns on the GPS notification and alarms - he can manage that much at least- before heading out. The first stop is the old junkyard down by where the Streetscum tend to cluster; it’s full of scrap metal and the like. He’s never asked why Vang0 likes hanging out there, but he doesn’t want to make the dude uncomfortable or anything. He’ll learn eventually. 

Burger climbs the biggest pile he can find and glances around. He’s pretty sure his perception check isn’t that bad, but what does he know? He doesn’t see Vang0 around anywhere, even though he calls once or twice. The only reaction is a scrawny, sad-looking pigeon who makes a half-hearted hop away from him. Huh. He sits down; it doesn’t make a move. It’s a weird thing, to see a bird nearby, even a pigeon- they’re so rare out here in the cities that it’s always nice to know they still exist.

“Aw, come here, lil’ guy,” he coos, shrinking down on himself as he slides off the pile of junk to land nearby. He crouches and scatters some kibble near it, and it doesn’t even hesitate before going to town. It peers up at him, afterward. If he squints, he can see a tag around its leg, glossy and sequined.

Probably someone’s abandoned pet. It reminds him of Vang0, in a way. He offers it a hand, and it pecks disinterestedly at his finger. Its beak doesn’t hurt- birds’ beaks had stopped being sharp, nearly all at once, in about 2030 thanks to some weird experimentation jazz mixed with the nuclear whatsit from the Pitt- and he leaves his hand there for a second before pulling it back. He scatters some more kibble and leaves it to its feast.

His second stop is interrupted by running into Dasha, who sighs with relief upon seeing him. “Any news?”

“Nope,” he says sadly. “Not yet. It’s a lot slower on foot.”

“I’m going to head to a fixer bar I know,” she says. “Want to come with?”  
  


“Oh, I never got an ID when I turned 21.” He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly- he had been in the hospital at the time getting a new jaw, and after that, the agricorps came, and… well, he just hadn’t had time.

Dasha doesn’t say anything, just looks at him like she’s trying to either understand or file the info away somewhere. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll message you.”

“I’m gonna go up to the old burned-out church next,” Burger tells her. It feels like she should at least know where he’s planning to go. “He liked the top floor.”

She gives him the exact same look a second time and he _still_ doesn’t know quite how to understand it. “Okay. You do that, Burger.”

He feels like he should say something here, like “stay safe” or “what does that look mean” or “i’m sorry” but she walks briskly away and he’s left staring after her for a second before slowly starting to walk off, feeling a little like a lost puppy but unable to understand why. 

-

The burned-out church isn’t there anymore. It’s been replaced by a shiny new skyscraper that matches every other skyscraper in the city. Burger gazes at it for a second, remembers how the dark and cold of the inside always felt comforting and the dust swirling was refreshing amidst all the chrome and rippers. Gave him a taste of home even in the big city. Remembers finding Vang0 lying on his back in the uppermost floor, staring up through the burnt-out ceiling, hands incredibly pale against the dark wood. Vang0 told him it was damaged and abandoned in the Night City Holocaust before he moved to the city when someone bombed an Arasaka tower. Now that piece of history is gone.

Burger sighs and moves on. No use crying over torn-down relics.

Location three- The Warehouse, which gets capitals, according to Vang0, because it’s important. He won’t say why, but Burger’s fairly sure it’s the place he woke up. He’s found him there many a sleepless night, sitting on the roof or wandering the inside with his cyberdeck up and running. Burger wonders why he netruns in here anymore- he’s definitely found everything there is to find.

It’s locked, but he easily wrenches the lock from the door and opens it. Vang0 probably has a sneaky way in normally, but Burger’s a little too tall to go anywhere Vang0 does. He’s not really in the mood to get stuck halfway through a half-open window right now.

“Hello?” he calls out, his voice echoing. It’s dark in here, completely empty, with a few dusty and cobwebbed windows. Or are they spiderwebs? What’s the difference? He’d asked Vang0 once and got a snort and the response of “English has so many tautologies.” Still couldn’t puzzle out what that meant, not to mention he only understood four of the words in that sentence.

No response- nobody’s inside. Might’ve hauled ass out when Burger went in, but thinking on it, he didn’t see the Keanumobile outside. _Shit,_ he thinks. He tries to order his thoughts the way Dasha does- where would Vang0 hide out, if he left them unexpectedly in the middle of a mission, almost twenty-six hours ago, now? And stole a van? And-

Wait a second, Vang0 stole a van. With Burger’s tracking stuff inside.

_Oh._

He fires up his agent and opens the pre-installed GPS tracker in it. He doesn’t give himself a hard time for not thinking about it; he already knows he’s not the fattest chicken in the coop. Instead, he focuses on figuring out where it went. The agent takes a moment to calculate the tracking pattern- it’s getting old, now, and they always slow down when a new model comes out on the market. He’s gonna use it ‘til he can’t anymore, though. Slowly, the blue tracking line blinks on- it tracks as far as the eastern edge of Night City, then stops.

Well shit.

He wheels around on the pavement, stopping belatedly to leave a note by the door that says _sorry for breaking your lock_ in his neat, blocky handwriting. His mom had taught him when he was young to write, which is more than most younger people these days knew how to do. He was pretty proud of the skill. First, he writes Dasha- _hey, im gonna go leave the city, back l8r_ \- and when he gets no response, he takes it as a go-ahead.

Unfortunately, there’s no sign of Vang0 or the Keanumobile by the eastern edge of the city. It’s almost 8 pm by the time he gets there, too- he’s a slow walker in general, content to amble along, but it’s getting darker. He’s not scared of the gangs that are going to be out there, but he doesn’t know if he can catch up at this rate. Maybe he can find him when he comes back- he’ll find him quicker that way if he follows the highway. 

-

His feet hurt by the time his agent pings with a stream notif from _vang0bang0,_ and he almost absentmindedly clicks on it before realizing the name and that _oh holy shit it’s Vang0!_

He pauses along the side of the highway to watch the stream, running a quick perception check as it boots- the NET’s patchy at best out here, and it takes a second. He doesn’t recognize the room, but he does recognize the emblem on the opposite wall- it’s a skull made of wires.

_Vang0, what’d you get yourself into?_

There’s a weird greenish overlay over everything showing a grid and weird lines and weird golden things that Vang0’s trying to fight off, but it’s translucent so he can see that there’s people fighting him, too. His heart drops- he’s never seen the NET before, but he knows enough about it from what Vang0’s rambled about to understand he’s under fire from Black ICE agents. Chat’s scrolling nearly too fast to keep up, but Burger’s seen enough to know he _needs to get the fuck over there._

Vang0’s talking- “Hey, guys, uh, Vang0 Bang0-” he coughs and then tries to fire his heavy pistol at a cultist, but it’s jammed and instead he throws it. “Recording for, uh, y’know, posterity I guess. Anyway, this might be the last time you hear from me, for, uh- a w _hile-_ ” he presses a button on his arm that Burger dimly recognizes as some netrunner thing, and the dog-looking Black ICE monster falls back. “So, y’know, just- thought I’d make sure people know how- it went.”

Burger glances down the highway, hands trembling, but purposely clearing his mind. God, Vang0 was talking like- like he was about to- he shakes his head, mind spinning, looking down the highway. Making do with vehicles is his thing. Making _dumb, nearly suicidal plans_ with vehicles is even _more_ his thing.

He lights up when he sees a motorcycle driving down the freeway, and does a quick double-check- Athletics, then Cool. He’s seen the maneuver once, he thinks, in an old movie from the mid-2010s, and if he can replicate it- 

He’s pretty sure he crit’d when he pulls off the maneuver- boots the rider off the motorcycle, swings himself onto it instead and speeds out in the opposite direction. It wobbles under his weight a second, and he’s certain it’s made for a lighter rider- or maybe one with stability mods, holy shit, how do people ride these things- but after a moment he regains his balance and pulls onto the correct side of the highway.

The mental debate- not that it’s much of one- is quick. Should he stick with the traffic laws? Or should he just… peel out? He thinks briefly that if he crashes, he doesn’t have a helmet to guard him.

It’s not much of a mental debate, though, mostly because he hears a stuttering yelp of pain that sounds distinctly Vang0-like from his agent, and he braces himself as he guns the bike and swerves right.

Almost immediately he’s deafened by honks, and he twists the handles as far back as they’ll go- the past rider must’ve been a pretty cool person (or a pretty rich one,) because as he pulls them all the way back an extra burst of speed hits and suddenly he’s going WAY faster than what’s probably legal or safe. He leans over the handlebars and grits his teeth against the tears in his eye from the wind. Dasha downloaded him some tech for his agent a while back that let him track Vang0 through his streams, because she is a fan of invading everyone’s privacy except her own. He’s thankful for that tech now; he’ll have _some_ idea how far he is away, like a weird game of hot and cold.

The wind whips his denim jacket back, lashing his legs; he barely takes notice. He’s got a job.

-

The place he pulls into is an empty-looking run-down house, and he mutes his agent as he moves nearby. He considers stealth for a moment, then summarily fails the stealth check by pulling his shotgun from his back and kicking the goddamn door down. YOLO, and all that.

The place is pretty brightly lit and holy shit is that Vang0 and _holy shit are they trying to put cyber shit in his arms?_ He’s still got his weird netrunning visor thing on, but it's askew; his cyberdeck looks like it’s been powered down pretty poorly and he’s still jacked in. There are eight or nine cultists, all told, four of whom are crowded around Vang0, the rest of whom are chanting weirdly in another language- he wouldn’t know which one, though.

All of this goes through his head with his kick-ass perception check- _damn_ he is rolling hot today- before he follows Vang0’s lead from the afternoon before and raises his shotgun, firing off a spray of bullets in his surprise round. He knows they’ll be all jacked up with cybernetics, now, but he’s pissed as _fuck_ and when he hits 3 out of 4 of the ones surrounding Vang0, he _sprints_ across the room and knocks the last one out cold. Bonus actions are useful as shit.

The other four cultists stand in shocked silence for a second before pulling rippers and guns. One unloads their gun at him, but he throws himself to cover Vang0 and dodges them; another comes at him with rippers, and scratches six long lines across his chest. He wonders if he’s been hit with ‘dorph or even lace, but he doesn’t feel the pain- something pumping through his blood won’t let him. The other two rush to protect the book in the middle of the room.

Burger kicks the one in front of him across the room and takes a single quick shot at the other one before unplugging Vang0 from the netspace and pulling the virtuality goggles off. He slumps, eyes flickering open, and Burger picks him up, cradling him in both arms. 

He looks tiny like this. 

“You fuckers are going to regret that,” Burger growls. He doesn’t know what he means by that- not like he has any more of his turn left- but it sounds cool. 

Vang0, conscious again, grins up at Burger for a split second. There’s blood staining his teeth and dribbling from his nose; Burger resists the urge to wipe it off. He grabs a hold of Hatchet and fires off a shot or two, sending them both a step backward with the recoil; it’s an unsteady shot but it gets the guy through his shoulder. It’s honestly impressive- his check must’ve been _insane_ to make that work. That finished, he slumps again. 

He’s awake, Burger can tell with a quick free-action human perception check, but his eyes are dull and glassy; he _has_ to get him out of there. He pulls a reaction to drop behind a table as bullets whiz overhead, then rolls a quick athletics and overturns the table as he leaps back to his feet and _sprints_ out. 

He bursts out the doors into the open air; it’s bright inside but dark outside, and his eyes take a second to adjust. It’s oppressively hot outside, too, despite being all of twelve thirty in the morning or so. Sweat drips into his eyes as he lays Vang0 across the back seat of the Keanumobile and rips some pieces off of the motorcycle so the cultists can’t follow before jumping in the front seat and kicking the van into high gear.

Vang0 groans sort of sadly from the back seat- it feels a little like when he lived on the farm and would have to drive the local farm cats to the doctor techs when they got sick. He has a feeling he’ll be repeating _sorry, sorry_ the same way when he hits potholes on the way back.

“Gotta go back in,” Vang0 wheezes when he turns onto the main road. Burger glances in the back mirror; he’s still bleeding pretty bad from the nose, but he’s grasping blindly for the goggles still strung around his neck.

“Nah you don’t,” Burger tells him as he merges onto the highway, urging Keanu to a higher speed. He’s sluggish; maybe Vang0 messed around in his parts too much. “You almost died, Vang0, you want that to happen again?”

“I was learning things,” Vang0 says, then takes a second to breathe- Burger’s perception is high enough that he can hear the breath rattling in his ribs and _whoo boy that is not safe!_ “Was three files deep when they pulled me.”

“Yeah, but not worth your life,” Burger protests. He locks the doors and adds the child lock, too, just in case.

“It’s a huge sprawling thing,” Vang0 says. His voice sounds odd; half-thin and strained, half his usual confident nonchalance. “I- gh- I downloaded the files I could, there’s a whole bunch of em. They’re called booster gang cults, I didn’t know if you knew-”

“Well- just how many are there?”  
  


Vang0 takes a deep, shuddering breath. Burger can see his cybernetic eye flicker a brighter blue. “Four thousand two hundred and thirty-nine, about seventeen percent of which have more than fifteen members, so that’d be- seven hundred and twenty major branches.”

“Vang0- I don’t know if we can take down that many, Vang0,” Burger says nervously. He’s never been one to mask his emotions. No point to it that he can see, other than intimidating people, and there’s no reason to intimidate Vang0. His voice openly rises in pitch.

“We’ll need something big,” Vang0 says. “And- well, we’ll need Dasha.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "there is someone else we need-" "i know. dapper dash!" "sir, she knows what to do in a fight, fast and strong and bright-" 
> 
> thus ends my parody of hamilton. idk i think it'll be better than the actual one
> 
> leave a comment if you enjoyed! gives me the good good motivation i need to update on time.


	4. vang0 thinks dasha's a little upset

The first sign Vang0 gets that Dasha is maybe a little bit unhappy comes when Burger is telling him about the adventure. 

Certain parts sound a little embellished- there’s _no_ way this guy actually _talked to_ a _pigeon-_ first of all pigeons haven’t been seen in months, not to mention the nonsense of talking to one- but he doesn’t bother with a Human Perception check to find out. That being said, he definitely believes Burger sent the tersest text in existence to a person who likes as much detail as possible, please thanks, and was the incident with Dasha leaning out the window and yelling “ _IN!?”_ only a week ago? He figures they’ll be in some shit, but not that much shit.

“Listen, I was- under pressure, okay?” Burger says in a complaining tone. “You didn’t leave me with very many options, you know.” 

“Ugh- it was more important! I thought I could handle it!” Vang0 complains back. Burger’s nice, but sometimes the _bigger picture is more important,_ _Chainz._

The second sign comes as soon as they enter the limits of the NET and Vang0’s wrist (the sprained one, not the okay one) goes all buzzy with texts. He cringes in pain but obligingly flicks through them.

6:07 PM - 7/9/2045

 _DD: Vang0, where’d you go?_ _  
_ _DD: Vang0, report to the van ASAP._

_DD: Vang0?_

9:30 PM - 7/9/2045

_DD: VB, I’m going searching for you if you don’t answer my texts in 30 minutes._

10:03 AM - 7/10/2045

_BC: Hey I Don’t Know If You’re In One Of Your Usual Spots But It’d Be Really Great If You Could Let Us Know Where You’re At. Dasha And I Are A Little Worried_

_BC: I’m Not Mad At You For Stealing Keanu, Don’t Worry :-]_

9:33 PM - 7/10/2045

_DD: Vang0, Burger’s gone. Call me ASAP._

_DD: Is Burger with you? He went looking for you_

12:29 AM - 7/11/2045

_DD: You’ve been gone for a while. Come home._

And the last set, which were sent about 20 minutes ago, 2:53 AM 7/11/2045-

_DD: VB. We need to regroup. I’m serious. I’m asking around if anyone’s seen you._

“Ooh, Dasha’s mad,” Burger notes from the front seat. He stretches out the “ooh,” as if he’s a kid in school tattling.   
  


“She’s calling in favors,” Vang0 says. “She probably called in all her fixer friends, or at least the ones that are left. Her network.”

“She has a network?” 

_God,_ Burger’s dumb sometimes. Couldn’t survive without him, but. “Yeah- do you not know how- ugh- the way fixers work is that they have, like, these networks of people, just, like, people on the street and other fixers, usually people like, corps and techs, a couple’a ripperdocs, that kind of thing. That’s how they, like, get their reputation of knowing _everyone_.

“Oh. You’re so smart, Vang0,” Burger says. Vang0… doesn’t have a response scripted for this, so he keeps his mouth shut.

The third sign that Dasha is unhappy comes in the form of a guy watching the east entrance of Night City. At first, Vang0 doesn’t see him and is completely confused as to why Burger starts pulling over on what is ostensibly still a pretty heavily trafficked road, but as he forces himself upwards (and ignores the blood he’s dribbled all over Burger’s back seat, he already owes Burger enough favors-) (and ignores the pain in his ribcage because that’s not helping anyone right now) he sees a fairly nondescript man waving them over. 

The dude has the look of a typical netrunner- metal hand with a sleeve covering what’s probably a cyberdeck, fashionable but nondescript asymmetrical shimmery orange jacket, ports peeking from under the collar- none plugged in, though. Nothing that screams _danger_ to Vang0, really. 

“Heya, my dude, what can I do ya for?” Burger asks. To be honest, Vang0 wouldn’t even have pulled over. Burger’s weirdly trusting. Probably got used to it on the farms and in his old Nomad gang. 

“You Burger Chainz?” He’s got an interesting accent; sort of northwestern but with a weird way of drawing the syllables out. Vang0’s gripped with a sudden urge to know where it came from. He tamps it down firmly. There is no reason to know where a random guy’s accent came from.

“Sure am! D’ya need somethin’?” Burger asks. Vang0 tries to catch his eye and say _just keep going, what the fuck are you doing?_

“Yeah, uh, a friend of yours asked me to keep an eye out for you. You know her as Dasha, I think?”

“Is there another name she goes by?” Burger asks. Vang0 knows there isn’t, not legally- he’d dug up everything he could find about his new associates as soon as their first job together, six months ago for a person named Thorn, had learned about Dasha’s fall from fame and about Burger’s weird arrest a year ago. He’s no fixer but he can do a basic background check.

“A few,” the netrunner says. “You can call me Fiberglass, Dash’ll be right over.”

“Oh, good!” Burger says brightly. “I was wondering where she was.”

“It seems she was wondering the same about you,” Fiberglass tells them. “She called up nearly every single fixer in the city. I got a call from her, but then I also got calls from about seven other people.”

“Did she now?” Burger asks. “Well, all righty then.”

Privately, Vang0 worries about how she’s going to react when she sees him. He knows Dasha is the type to do emotion secretly but show none of it- she cares more than she lets on- but that doesn’t line up with this reaction. 

The fourth sign that Dasha is unhappy comes even before she gets to them; slowly, a group of fixers and fixer-adjacent people gather around. Vang0’s shocked they bothered; shouldn’t they have seen Fiberglass and kept walking, knowing he had the situation under control? But when he asks this of them, one just gives him a Look (he thinks she’d introduced herself as Lune?) and says, “You made Dasha pretty scared for a while there, didn’t you?”

Vang0’s never been one to pass up publicity, but it’s nevertheless a weird thing having a small congregation of people around him. He’s never so much as seen a fan on the street, at least not one that was outwardly a fan or recognized him; it’s thoroughly unnerving to be surrounded by people better-connected than he is and who don’t know him at all in person but probably have dug up every single file they could find on him. Like, not that he has expectations of privacy, but give a guy a _couple_ secrets, y’know?

The fifth sign that Dasha is unhappy is when the woman of the hour herself comes striding up, hair whipping around her redder-than-usual cheeks. She looks… not disheveled, but not nearly her usual immaculate self. Like she’d recently, hastily, put herself back in order; there’s a noticeable red mark against the sides of one finger that looks like she’d hastily redone her lipstick.

“Thank you all so very kindly for your help,” she says first to the eight or nine people pretending very hard to be innocuous, who all shuffle off down the street; one or two give Dasha a smile. That done, she turns to them and hops in the passenger seat of the van.

“You are going to take me back to the apartment,” she tells Burger (and probably Vang0 too, he surmises, though it’s not directly addressed to him,) “and then you are going to tell me what the hell happened and then we are going to go to a friend of mine’s who happens to have one of those fancy tissue regenerators so Vang0 can get his dumbass fixed up, because I’m calling in every goddamn favor I have today.”

Her voice is not quite ice-cold, but it brooks no argument, and Vang0 thanks whatever’s out there that Burger just easily says, “Okay, Dasha. I’m sorry to make you worry,” and puts the van into gear instead of trying to justify himself just yet. 

The sixth sign that Dasha is unhappy comes when they get to her apartment (she’s the only one that has one, after all, Vang0 sleeps wherever and whenever he wants and Burger sleeps in the van or the boat.) Burger has to help him up the stairs because even though he _insists_ he’ll be _fine,_ he is maybe a little shaky on the first step (okay, so he falls, what about it? Fuck off.)

She crosses straight to the false-bottom drawer she thinks he doesn’t know about, raises the false bottom, and pulls out a bottle of real alcohol, not the shitty moonshine most clubs these days sell. She unscrews it, flicks the lid off, and drinks a gulp directly from the bottle.

“Wow,” Burger says. “Dasha, you okay?” Which is admittedly pretty much what Vang0 was wondering, except he wasn’t gonna _say_ it.

“Not really!” she exclaims. “First of all _you_ leave, and then I have to call in a half dozen favors- which is _a lot of favors!-_ and then when I go to try and drown my feelings because I figure my favors have got this under control, Lexus finds me and tells me Vang0’s about to fucking _die-_ ”

“I wasn’t about to die,” Vang0 cuts in, because that’s just slander. “I was holding my own.”

“You shut up!” she says, almost at a yell, “And then-”

“I was just saying,” Vang0 mumbles-

“And then Burger disappears into the fucking void that is the highway with like, _zero_ directions! So I have to leave the bar and go try to _find_ you fucks, and all I found out is that the CEO of fucking _Talc_ subscribes to their ideology!”

She says a couple of things after that, Vang0 thinks, but Vang0’s too busy considering. There’s always a bigger fish, in his experience, and what if the biggest fish of this cult is Talc Co? 

There’s motive- Talc Co develops cybernetic enhancements, after all, and clearly they would get more sales if they started a huge cult based around cybernetics and how they make people better, even if they brought people to the brink of cyberpsychosis.

He continues steadfastly ignoring Dasha’s diatribe and instead flicks open his agent, which still has battery- it siphons off the Net when he connects, he’s found out after a fair few confusing battery recharges- and summarily fails his Tech roll to try and jack into the accounts of some workers, even though he’s pretty sure it wasn’t that bad. Of course they’d have good cybersecurity.

“Vang0, are you listening?” Dasha asks loudly. Which is of course redundant- Dasha doesn’t do many things quietly- but it’s louder than her baseline loud.

“No,” he responds bluntly, and she sputters.

“Wh- I’ve got this whole angry monologue thing going on, and you’re just gonna- not?”

“You said the CEO of Talc subscribes to that Cyberpsych Brotherhood bullshit?” Vang0 says instead. “I think he runs it.”

“You think he-?”

“Well, think about it,” Vang0 says. “Juno Cybranth is the leader of Talc, right? They make cybernetics, and they could, y’know, stand to make a little money off of this.”

“Off of givin’ people cybernetics?” Burger asks incredulously.

“Well, yeah,” Vang0 says. “The cultists who forcibly enhance people have to buy those enhancements somewhere, don’t they?”

“So you’re saying they’re using this to make money?”

“Well, I’m saying we should look into it,” Vang0 says. 

“What were the cybernetics they used in the cult’s shed?” Burger interjects. Vang0 blinks- he hadn’t even thought of that. He needs to give Burger more credit sometimes- guy’s smarter than he lets on.

“Uh…” He hadn’t thought to look, but Dasha’s eyes light up and she pulls out her laptop, squashing herself between the two of them like usual even though there’s really no room there and hopping onto _twitchii.tv_ to flick back through the stream footage. He winces as his own yelp rings out across the room, and she mutes the site with her own matching wince.

She scrolls through until they get a closeup of the thing they were trying to shove in Vang0’s unenhanced arm. It’s a flashy chip, the kind you just inject easy peasy. It’s blue, which probably means something; Dasha squints at it. 

“Does model number 38452447 mean anything to you?”  
  


Vang0 runs a quick set of searches. “Uh-”

His brain thinks a lot of things at once.

_Yeah, it does. It’s Talc property._

_This is a lead to my past._

_It’s a chip that permanently alters memories. Unremovable._

_This is a lead to my past._

_I could have been implanted with this. I could have been implanted with this before._

_It’s a lead._

He doesn’t say much, but stands and makes to walk out of the room. His head _spins- fuck_ , ow- and Burger shoots up to catch him. Dasha closes her laptop. 

“Where are we going?” she says. It’s alert- not in a _why_ sense, but in a genuine _where_ sense.

“Talc Co- has the- uh, it’s- chip was made by Talc Co. It alters memories, so I-”

Dasha stands abruptly and loops one arm around his waist. It’s more physical contact than he’s used to from her, so he flinches for a moment- she adjusts to avoid his broken rib carefully - and says, “Should we be doing this? I still have the tissue regeneration guy on call-”

“Probably we should not be doing this,” Burger says.

“Yeah, but- when have we ever let that stop us, really?” Vang0 says.

-

Talc Co is an intimidatingly tall building. It’s not taller than the other buildings on the block, mind you, but it’s still a solid 100 stories; they pause in the van. They’ve got parking, but not for long. 

“So the plan,” Dasha says, “is to go in and out. Act like we’re looking to buy a new cyberdeck for Vang0. No more than 20 minutes, just some recon. Nothing major.”

Burger nods. Vang0 nods with him. He’s had some juice on the way; it’s doing a lot to help, actually. Plus, Burger and Dasha insisted on stopping at her friend's, who did have a tissue regenerator (probably illegally gained) and promised it would only take a minute or two. It took four, but you can't really stop those things mid-cycle.

When he slides out of the backseat, he’s remarkably unshaky. Thank God- it was starting to do a number on his dignity that he couldn’t _stand up_ on his own. 

The doors are automatic; slide open with a single overhead security camera, and there’s no security in sight as they---------------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MUAHAHA. 
> 
> drop a comment or a kudos! would love some good ol validation, yknow?


	5. dasha needs better friends

Dasha watches in confusion as Vang0 stops moving, then mixed fascination and horror when his cybernetic iris  _ explodes outward. _ Not outside of his eye, mind you, just to wash out any sign of pupil and then sclera, until his whole eye is the pure blue of a crashed computer. 

She stops being fascinated when he  _ drops. _

Not in an organized sense, mind you. Just crumples to the ground, a puppet with his strings cut, eyes still open and staring up. Burger jolts backward in shock, but-

_ Fuck, _ if Vang0-

She drops to one knee right there on the pavement, holds her fingers to his nose. Faint puffs of air reassure her, but he’s breathing shallowly; they need a doctor, a _ real  _ doctor, stat.

Burger’s got enough cool to have not frozen up, so she looks up at him. “He’s alive, but in bad shape. We have to get to Hypo’s. No negotiation.”

“Okay,” he says easily, lifting Vang0 into his arms. Dasha hurries ahead and slides into the van, already calling Hypo.

“This is Hypo, what can-”

“Hypo. It’s Dasha. I need to call in that favor stat.” She’s called emergencies in more than once to various places, so it’s not hard to easily catalog the things she needs to tell him. “It’s Vang0 - shallow breathing, near-comatose. Probably a cybernetic malfunction-”

Oh,  _ fuck,  _ she knows what’s happening. Fuck. Nothing Hypo will care about, but something to consider moving forward.

“-the cybernetics in his eye exploded and he collapsed. Not sure if he hit his head or not. Recent tissue regeneration in his seventh rib, his left wrist, kidney, and nose.”

She can hear typing on the other end- putting in information, probably- then, “Anything else?”

“ETA-” she glances at Burger- “probably 3 minutes. 4, tops.”

“Okay-” she hangs up on him before he can say anything else. Burger’s already driving, so she talks fast.

“Vang0’s eye is Talc tech, probably. His past almost certainly has something to do with Talc tech, too. There’s no way it’s a coincidence. We can’t bring him on this mission- we’ll get him set up at Hypo’s, then we’ll do it ourselves.”

“But Vang0-”

“Vang0 needs time to heal, but I can think of a couple of reasons for this malfunction. The nerves in your eye are very closely interconnected with the brain. Either it’s a standard malfunction, that just _happened_ to interact with the brain and send him into- Burger, he looks like he’s in the _netspace._

“Either it’s a standard cybernetic malfunction, which is highly unlikely because the cyberoptics in that eye is  _ high-grade. _ It’s expensive stuff, too. Instant video capture and upload, built-in zoom and enhance tech, enhanced eyesight, night vision. The other option is that he’s been deliberately interfered with by Talc. I thought the thing over the door was a camera, but it could easily double as cybernetic interference.

“And if I’m right on the second option, the easiest way to break him out of it is to shut down Talc. Which was the plan anyway? We just have to move the plans up a bit!”

“Dasha, this is - this is a  _ lot, _ ” Burger says. “I mean- I don’t know what half the words you just said meant! But…”

“It’ll help Vang0,” she says. She keeps the coaxing out of her tone, but she’s definitely coaxing; she  _ needs  _ Burger for this one because she doesn’t think she’ll be able to take Talc down alone. Even with Burger, it’ll be much harder without Vang0. Margin of error: next to zero. Playing on ultra-hard mode, as Vang0 would put it, but there’s no chance to replay this- it’s not a video game. No revives.

Fuck.

She’s extra quick to unbuckle her seatbelt and hop out of the van as they pull into Hypo’s parking lot by the underpass.

Burger follows behind, holding Vang0 close to his chest. She brushes the thought aside that he looks so small in comparison. Fragile and delicate as a flower- a  _ real  _ flower, like an orchid.

She holds the door for them, ducks under the unnecessarily low back entrance to do it. Hypo’s waiting for them; Burger gently deposits Vang0 on the bed closest to them, which seems uninhabited enough; there’s no backpack next to it, and it’s neatly made. Hypo closes the curtain around them quick and snappy, even though nobody was watching.

He fits a respirator over Vang0’s nose and mouth first, opens the valve on an oxygen tank. Once his breathing settles, he turns to Dasha and Burger. “Tell me everything.”

Burger starts explaining- “well y’see we were walking into Talc on a job when he just dropped to the ground, and y’know at first I thought it was ‘cause he’d been hurt pretty bad not too long ago-” and Dasha sighs.

“We were walking through a set of automatic doors when something interfered with Vang0’s cybernetics. The little ring of blue- that’s usually where they sit- kind of expanded? It filled his whole eye and then he collapsed. I checked his breathing, noticed it was irregular, and Burger picked him up. We drove him here from Talc.”

Hypo nods once. “I’m gonna try a few things- nothing that should mess him up permanently, mind you, but stuff that might help him regain consciousness. Can you guys work on figuring out what’s going on?”

His eyes are piercing, Dasha notes. She keeps eye contact. 

“We’ll do our best, Hypo.”

\---

It’s never silent in Burger’s van.

There’s always chatter going on- Burger recounting his latest weird delivery, Vang0 introducing his viewers to their assignment, Dasha convincing the others to plan, Keanu talking Burger through directions.

It’s pretty damn close to silent today.

The unusually tense atmosphere settles like a sheet of cling wrap to the whole van; Dasha notices Burger’s clenching his jaw, which she thought he’d stopped doing years ago. But she finds herself toying with an old ring, twisting it around her finger. She hooks her fingers in the waistband of her pants, underneath her new belt.

The thing is-

The thing is, Vang0 might be the best out of the three of them.

Sure, Burger finds friends in everyone he meets, but he also… doesn’t hesitate. He has no qualms to hurt to the point of killing people. And Dasha’d be the first to admit she sees people as objects- means to an end- more than anything. 

But Vang0? Vang0 cares about peoples’ lives, intrinsically and truly. Vang0’s… a good person. He cares if people live or die. Not about their feelings on the matter, but he cares about their lives.

And Dasha’s scared that without his influence on the team, the other two might do something they regret.

Not scared. Anxious. Nervous? Concerned. She’s concerned that they’ll do something they’ll regret.

“What are you thinking about?” Burger breaks the silence.

“Worried about Vang0,” Dasha says. It’s not a lie, either; he was in bad shape. Burger pulls up outside of Talc but doesn’t put it into park, just keeps his foot on the brake. “I just don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Ah, well, Hypo’s probably got him covered,” Burger says. It’s supposed to be reassuring; Dasha doesn’t want to break it to him that that’s really not that reassuring anyway. There’s a pause as she figures out what to say.

“You know what, you’re probably right,” she tells him. “Let’s go. You don’t have any Talc tech that you know of, do you?”

“Naw,” Burger says, then pauses. “Do you want me to get some?”

“I think we’ll be fine without,” Dasha tells him. She’s not suppressing a laugh, but she’s not unamused; Burger’s so weird sometimes.

They stride through the door; it opens easily and once they’re through, Dasha hazards a sideways glance at Burger. He hasn’t collapsed yet, so she guesses they’re in the clear-

  
“Hey, I didn’t collapse!” he notes excitedly. A shorter person inside glances at them.

“Pardon?” 

_ Why does this always happen, _ Dasha wonders as she flushes. “Uhh, nothing.”

“I’m just excited ‘cause I didn’t collapse on my way in and my friend collapsed and it was a little nerve wracking!” Burger says.

_ Burger, why. _

“Is that so?” they ask with eyebrows raised. “What’s your friend’s name?”

“Uh, his name is-”  _ think fast, Dasha- _ “Chrome.” 

“Chrome?”

“Yep!” Burger agrees.  _ Thank fuck.  _ She wasn’t sure he’d cotton on.

They narrow their eyes at her as if trying to figure out what she’s saying; she holds eye contact. She’s been doing that a lot today. Dasha presses on. “Um, do you work here?”

“Yes, I do. Can I help you with something?” they ask. “What are you looking for today?”

“Ah, my partner- Manhattan over here-” she grabs his elbow, squeezes it once hoping he’ll keep up his streak of  _ cottoning on. _ “-has been looking for a new eye or at least a place to upgrade it.”

“What’s wrong with my eye right now!?” Burger exclaims, probably genuine in his indignance. He touches the glass lens with one fingernail. “It’s worked perfectly fine for me for nearly seven years now!”

Dasha exchanges a faux-sympathetic glance with the employee. “I’m sure it works fine, Manhattan. But it could always work better, don’t you think?”

“We have a nice selection of the newest cyberoptics up on Floor 14,” they say. “Certainly you’ll find something compatible with-” they rake their gaze critically over Burger, clearly not particularly happy, and Dasha has to resist the suddenly-overwhelming urge to punch them in the teeth. “-that old eye you’ve got in there.”

“Of course,” Dasha says, all faux-smile, as Burger protests lamely behind her. “Thank you  _ so  _ much. Where can I, um, find the elevators?”

“Just over to your right and past the second door,” they smile back. “Hope you find what you’re looking for!”

“Thank you so much!” Dasha says again, because extra politeness never hurts in these situations, and tugs Burger along behind her towards the elevators. 

As soon as they step in the sleek metal interior and glance around, Burger complains, “What was that all about?”

“Needed entry, you were convenient.” She presses the topmost button- it’ll only get them up to floor fifty. She muses aloud for a second- “We’ll probably want to get to the top floor, so there might be an employee entrance to a set of stairs or another elevator that’ll take a keycard.”

Burger picks up a couple of visitor lanyards from the bowl in the corner of the elevator and hands one to Dasha, stringing another around his own neck. She watches him take a handful more. “What are you doing?”

“Braiding them,” he says easily.

“We’re almost at our floor.” 

“Then I’ll braid them later,” he grumbles, tucking them into a pocket of his denim vest that makes an odd clanking sound when he deposits them. 

“Okay?” she says, because honestly she’s seen Burger do weirder things. 

The doors slide open to reveal a long hallway lined with conference rooms. She surveys it; each has a sign over the top that reads either  _ In Session _ or  _ Vacant. _ She strides to the end of the hallway, but there’s nothing there- no door reading EMPLOYEES ONLY, just a blank wall.

“Uh, Dasha, I’m not sure there’s a way up from here,” Burger says unhelpfully from behind her. She doesn’t huff, like Vang0 would, but she does hurry into a room that reads VACANT and close and lock the door behind them, switching the little dial from  _ Vacant  _ to  _ In Session. _

“We need a game plan,” she says.

“Uhhhhh,” Burger says. “We could try every floor- and hear me out- we could try every floor in order to find the staircase?”

“We’d attract too much attention,” Dasha points out.

“Or… we could…” Burger trails off, glancing out the window. Dasha follows his gaze, but there’s nothing there- they’re on the fiftieth story, duh.

“What? Why are you looking out the-  _ no, _ ” she says, realizing what he’s about to suggest. “We’d fall and die, it’s completely flat and we are fifty stories up!”

“We could probably make it,” Burger tells her.

“Burger, do you have  _ any _ idea how low my athletics is?” she hisses. “We can’t climb up the side of the building, we will  _ not make it! _ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> famous_last_words.mp3
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Please consider dropping a comment or a kudos- helps me with that good good motivation!


	6. RESTARTING PROJECT VANG0...

wake

feel?

feel? 

feelthings.check fail

sight?

open_eyes.bat

green

green?

electronic green

netscape?

connection.check success 9 ms

why?

why?

_ why _ ?

memory?

can’t remember-

can’t  _ remember- _

vang0 bang0 remember me--

vang0 bang0

it’s me

vang0 bang0 

remember me

remember me remember me

where?

hospital? no

run_gps.bat

hypo?

drugtest negative 0 ppm

why-

who-

who is-

on bed?

me?

is that me?

why am i-

not in body? 

_ wrong wrong wrong _

_ why not in body _

_ why--- _

consciousness not inside-

netscape?

running?

must be.

memories_file accessing

accessing

accessing

opening memories_file

  * collapse



  * big building



  * talc?



talc- 

walking into talc- crashed-

fake security camera-

hijack?

scan, scan, scan environment-

no black ICE?

need to order thoughts

breathe

no lungs

can’t breathe can’t  _ breathe- _

calm

calm down.

calm down, [REDACTED]

whoa.

where- who? what?

_ memory? _

need to find memories

talc has memories

what if-

inject into talc?

go to talc go-

need better attack programs-

go anyway

injecting program...

uploading to network…

uploading to network…

FILE LEVEL: 1

Please input password.

password_breaker.cmd

Access denied.

password_breaker.cmd

Access denied.

fucking hell

password_breaker.cmd

Access granted.

hacker voice, i’m in

no, that’s dumb

shut up, vang0

FILE LEVEL: 2

obstacle_scan.bat

black ICE imp  _ fuck fuck- _

ouch-

zap.jar

fuck yeah, 4 rez-

4/3 rez, dissolve  _ dissolve _ please-

imp.ICE has crashed. Reboot? Y/ **N**

file_download.cmd

Files downloaded. 

big interface, wow-

sales information

employee information, poor encryption

nothing of importance, move on

FILE LEVEL: 3

obstacle_scan.bat

oh, that's cute, data shield?

interface roll result: 9 + 7 = 16

data shield broken

easy peasy. not bad at this.

file_download.cmd

single level of encryption. rip

employee account information- could be useful

data mining operations: anomaly detection, metrics

more information find more information

FILE LEVEL: 4

obstacle_scan.bat

No obstacles found.

must be an object-

globe? shows all TALC corp sites-

no.

wait.

those are cult sites.

i was right. no surprise there.

talc runs the cyberpsych brotherhood.

cool cool cool cool cool cool.

let’s download those files, huh?

file_download.cmd

security footage?

let’s scrub through

wait, is that-

are they climbing?

are-

what are they  _ doing? _

they’re almost at the top

i can’t believe they’re doing this

dumbasses. 

wait, something else-

a list of… sleeper agents?

....sleeper agents--

oh,  _ shit. _

if i wipe this system…

i lose everything, right?

let’s keep going.

FILE LEVEL: 5

obstacl-

FUCK HELLHOUND HELLHOUND HELLHOUND

my fucking head-

fuck,  _ ow- _

zap.jar

3 rez- gonna have to do better-

oh, fuck-

_ ow- _

file_download.cmd

a couple things-

fuck-

no, wait-

is that-

_ hellhound! _

zap.jar

2 rez.  _ fuck- _

I need to wipe the system.

_ I need to wipe this system. _

Help Dasha and Burger-

wipe the system-

that means my memories-

_ ow, fuck _ , fucking hellhound-

my streaming-

gone forever?

  
  
  


**pause.**

i need my memories back.

i don’t have time to download them.

am i being selfish?

when have i  _ cared  _ about being selfish?

but every other sleeper agent-

they need me to wipe this.

can i miss something i don’t remember?

i’m still inside the file.

will i wipe my consciousness?

…

burger would delete this system.

so would dasha.

selfless bastards.

…

fucking  _ fine. _

**resume-**

  
  
  
  


delete_sys_backup.cmd

Are you sure? This action is not reversible. Y/N

Y

took care of the hellhound at least-

sys_reset.cmd

Are you sure? This action is not reversible. Y/N

…

Y

Enter admin password:

password_breaker.cmd

Access granted. Deleting files…

-

Before he can think too hard about it, Vang0 wipes the system.

Files spiral around him, glowing ethereal electric green, a whirlwind not unalike to leaves whipped up by the wind from the forest floor. One by one, he sees them start to fizzle out like the hellhound had done seconds before, like the imp had done back on level 2. 

His hands are flaking, too; though he knows the netscape already has a tendency to make netrunners turn monochromatic green and translucent, he watches as his fingers turn into ashes and vanish, and as his arms follow suit he sees a file flash past him- a folder, to be specific. He catches a glimpse of the words on the front of it: 

Project Vanguard 01/23 (VANG-0)

_ Oh, _ he thinks sort of distantly as he sees it vanish in a puff of dust.  _ There go my memories. _

He glances down. His legs are almost entirely gone, now; his arms already vanished. 

_ Well, _ he thinks a little wryly,  _ at least I’ll be remembered.  _

Then he vanishes into nothingness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was fun to figure out how a "crescendo" of words would work for this chapter- probably my favorite that I've worked on all fic.
> 
> It's getting real, y'all. 
> 
> Please drop kudos and comments! They give me that good good motivation I need to keep writing. I get very few comments and I promise I would be thrilled to see yours!


	7. burger would like explanations, please?

“I can’t believe that worked,” Dasha pants once they reach the roof. Burger thinks that’s a little unfair; it wasn’t  _ that  _ bad an idea, was it?

A perception check doesn’t come back with anything, but Dasha leads him to a hatch near a landing pad and opens it up.

“After you,” he offers, out of common politeness, and Dasha rolls her eyes and descends the staircase, leaning over a little to fit.

Burger follows suit, and his eyes take a second to adjust to the dim inside as he closes the hatch. “Let’s try and not make a fuss,” Dasha says at a whisper, “just keep it quiet. We need to somehow find Lionel.”

“You think he’s in here?”

“They double as an enhancement center,” Dasha tells him. “Basically an above-board ripperdoc.”

“Okay. Thank you for clarifying, by the way, I-”

“Come on,” Dasha interrupts, and slips further down the staircase.

_ Well, that’s rude, _ he thinks as he follows her. She crouches inside a closed door, and holds her ear to it. Burger follows her lead, because according to every spy movie he’s seen it’s The Thing to Do.

He can’t hear anything except his quiet breathing, though, so that’s a bust. Looking at Dasha’s face, she seems to have the same result, so they push the door open quietly and slip inside. Burger’s got good Stealth, and even once he opens the door, the person inside doesn't seem to see him.

Dasha, on the other hand, must’ve critical-failed her roll, because as she follows him inside she exclaims, “ _ Alleycat? _ ”

The figure at the desk stiffens, and he looks up sharply. “Dasha. How did you get in my office?”

“ _ Your off- _ I thought you were  _ dead! _ You were millions of eddies in debt to Netwatch! And suddenly you run a fucking  _ cult? _ ”

“I needed an excuse,” Alleycat says, still working on his computer- he’s putting a USB stick of some sort in- and Burger squints. He’s out of the loop, as usual-

“Will someone tell me what is going on?” Burger complains. Both of them start talking at once-

“This  _ motherfucker  _ lied about being a goddamn fixer for  _ five fucking years- _ ”

“I had to gather some data, so I I posed as a civilian and along that path I met Dasha-”

“-watched people  _ die  _ because they couldn’t afford medicine, without lifting a goddamn finger-”

“-and worked as a fixer in my offtime while I gathered some analytics about the interests of the civilian population and cybernetics-”

“-fucking  _ faked  _ an entire story about him being in  _ debt- _ ”

“Woah, woah, calm down,” Burger says, holding both hands up. “Can you just- explain this? One at a time?”

Both of them open their mouths at the same time, but Alleycat talks first.

“My name is Juno Cybranth,” he says. “I’m the CEO of Talc, Incorporated. And thirty-three years ago Talc was about to go under, so I took some drastic steps.”

Dasha starts to retort, “So you started a  _ cult!?” _ but he barrels on. 

“I needed a way to increase cybernetics sales, so I put out flyers and spread some information about cybernetic enhancement. But then as I kept doing research, I realized more and more that… cybernetic enhancement is the  _ future. _ Cyberpsychosis? That’s just realizing the inherent truth that humans are in and of themselves bad people. It’s justice through cybernetic enhancement.

“And it took off, because other people started seeing the truth. You are, all of you, scared of change. We’re seeing the  _ truth.  _ But the common people won’t believe that. So we’ve created time bombs- not explosives, but people. And once humanity is ready they’ll wake up. Start converting people. I heard from Lionel you started working with one of them- Project VANG-0?”   
  


“You heard from- you  _ kidnapped  _ Lionel,” Dasha says, voice going cold. Burger moves one hand towards Hatchet, ready to go if shit starts getting real. 

“No,” he said. “Lionel was getting too close to the truth, so I recruited him.”

“By knocking him out and pulling him into the back of a van?” Burger hears himself say. “That’s- abduction. You kidnapped Lionel.”

Juno sighs. “Listen, if you want to see it that way, then sure. I am, then, right in assuming you have no interest in joining the Cyberpsych Brotherhood?”

“Go to hell,” Dasha spits.

“Would you have the same reaction if I told you I have something you’d be interested in?” He takes the USB stick from his computer, flipping it over in his palm, and stands. “I have it on good faith that your friend Project VANG-0’s been looking for his memories of before. This is his file.”

“And we’re supposed to take it on faith that that’s true?” Dasha says.

“His name’s not Project VANG-0,” Burger points out. “It’s Vang0 Bang0.”

“Vang0 Bang0, then,” Juno sighs. “I give you my word.”

“You lied to me for _five years,_ _Cat_. Your word means jack _shit_ to me,” Dasha spits.

“Suit yourself, Dasha. Listen, Nomad, you’re a smart-looking fella-”

“Thank you-”

“- are you sure you want this opportunity to go away? This is Vang0’s dream. He’s been looking for his past since he woke up in the medical center.”

  
  


“He woke up in an empty warehouse,” Burger says.

“Well, we moved the things out of the center after the chip implant,” Juno says. The way he says it has a sort of disinterest to it that makes Burger... weirdly angry. How _dare_ he not care about Vang0. “Obviously. Otherwise, we couldn’t have planted him in a position with influence. The moderator of a popular server- it’s easy, then, once that time bomb trips, for him to tell everyone he knows about how great the Brotherhood is. To spread the truth-”

The lights go out, and the fan shuts down. Burger blinks, confused, but he can see Dasha making a realization- her eyes flick from place to place in the room.

“Fuck off, Alleycat,” she says, and raises her gun.

Several things happen at once-

Burger’s eyes widen, and he goes for his own but doesn’t get there before-

Juno Cybranth flings himself behind his desk-

and Dasha aims and fires at the center of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that make up one whole wall of the huge office. 

Cracks shoot across the pane, though it doesn’t break, and she yells, “GO GO GO!” Burger takes off towards the window, and she smashes it with her pistol before they both fling themselves through.

Burger realizes a couple things, then:

  1. They are on the hundredth story of a huge huge building in downtown Night City  

  2. Neither of them are prepared for this  
  

  3. They are going to become pancakes.



“I DON’T WANT TO BE A PANCAKE!” he yells over the wind, and Dasha grabs his hand and presses a button on her belt.

Instantly, instead of being roughly four seconds from the ground, they’re floating as a pretty neon pink ‘chute erupts behind Dasha and they touch down lightly. A couple people give applause, but apart from that nobody seems to care about the fact that they just jumped out of a CEO's office. Burger figures Night City as a whole is to blame for this.

As Dasha detaches the chute from the belt she glances at him. “We need to bring this whole place down.”

“Uh, I have some- wait-”

He darts back into the van and, working quickly, rolls a quick Basic Tech check using the parts from the motorcycle at the cult shed and some stuff he had in his glove box (who knows when you’ll need gunpowder?) 

Critical success. Hell yeah. He ends up with a smallish bomb, put together quickly and sort of messily, but it’ll be strong. He slides back out of the van and hands it to Dasha.

“OK, so we need to get everyone out of the basement enhancement area. Then we need to collapse this whole thing,” Dasha tells him. 

“Okay,” Burger says. “We can’t go in through the door, can we?”

“Probably not!” Dasha exclaims.

“I got it,” Burger says, and grabs his sawed-off before bashing it into the window several times.

It works just fine; the window shatters under the force, and he hops through. Dasha steps through after him, and says, “We won’t be able to use the elevator.”

“Okay,” Burger says. “Any reason why-?”

“Someone wiped every single computer in this building,” she says. “Including the ones in the elevator. Good news, I know how to get to the basement from here?”

“You do?” Burger asks. “How?”

She doesn’t answer, just hurries over to a hallway that says  _ Enhancement Chambers Below _ and heads in.

_ Well, that’d make sense,  _ he thinks, feeling a little stupid.

He follows her down a fancy marble staircase, and she takes a sharp right to head into a room that reads  _ Recovery Chamber. _

Two people seem to be there, both sitting up and looking kind of anxiously around. One is Lionel, who Burger recognizes from the footage, though he’s been outfitted with some new rabbit ears atop his head; the other is an unknown with yellow hair that’s shaved on one side and long on the other, and red chrome rippers. 

Lionel starts, “What’s- Dasha?”

“Long story short, Talc is a cult, we gotta get you out of here, can you walk?”

“I- wh- probably?” he says. “We just woke up and nobody was here-- where the hell are we-? What happened?”

“Yeah, long story. Come on,” Dasha says, and she carefully pulls out his IV and helps him to his feet as Burger checks on the blonde.

“Hey, my name’s Burger. I’m here to help. What’s your name?”

“Cherries,” she says, looking very confused and sort of fuzzy. She flexes her hand sort of subconsciously, watching the rippers slide out. “Whassgoin’on? Where’re we? Who’re you?”

“Can you walk? I’m here to get you out of here.”

“Mmmbye?” she says, as Dasha passes Lionel to him. He stoops to let Lionel balance on his shoulder, and offers a hand to Cherries; she takes it, disconnecting her own IV and leaning heavily on him. 

“Dasha, can you-”

“I got it,” she says, holding the bomb carefully in one hand. “Get them out of here.”

Burger helps them up the stairs; they’re both dazed, probably loopy from the painkillers. He helps Lionel step through, then steps through himself to half-help, half-carry Cherries through. By the time they’ve stumbled down the sidewalk, both the others are breathing hard.

They’re clear of the building when he hears the huge  _ boom _ and turns to watch the building start to collapse on itself.

The dust starts to settle. He watches for Dasha's figure to come rushing out of the rubble.

She doesn’t.

“Dasha?” he calls, glances at Cherries and Lionel once- Cherries has her mouth covered with both hands, and Lionel’s entire face is tight. They still look fuzzy-headed, and Cherries is leaning on a fire hydrant to keep her standing, but it’s Burger that feels like he’s about to fall to his knees.

_ No- _

He sprints forward, ignoring the other people, and starts desperately moving rubble. “No, no, no-”

He  _ has  _ to find her- there’s no way- she saved his  _ life- _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comin' up on the end here, y'all! Just one chapter left :-)
> 
> Thanks to thebutterflymafia on Tumblr, who made an AWESOME depiction of Vang0 in Chap 6 that looks pretty much exactly how I imagined it!


	8. vang0 wakes up // aftermath

Vang0 stirs. His head hurts- feels like his brain’s been fried, which is probably not inaccurate if the few memories he can conjure are real and not some weird fever dream of being forcibly uploaded to the netspace.

He opens his eyes fuzzily and is immediately assaulted by bright light. Both eyes water, which is fucking  _ weird. _ His left eye hasn’t watered in his entire memory _. _ Not a dream, then.

“How are you doing?” asks Dr. Bussi, who’s crouching by his bed. She offers him a glance of water, and he takes it with his hand, which suddenly has tremors for some reason. “Can you tell me what happened?”

He takes a sip of water and hands it back. “Uh, y’know, the usual, just- got my consciousness kinda thrown into the netscape, got hit for- a fair few points by a couple Black ICE guys, that kind of thing? Also I, uh, terminated my cyberoptics’ functionality. Vang0 Bang0.”

“Okay,” she says. “You’ve been in and out for a bit. Just rest for a while, okay? You know those ICE attacks go straight to your brain.”

“Okay,” he says, already fading fast. He wants to protest against her patronizing manner or at least tell her that she’s oversimplifying, but he finds he’s asleep before he can.

01010110 01000001 01001110 01000111 00101101 00110000

Vang0 stirs. He feels like his mouth’s been stuffed with cotton, and his skull too; he’s fuzzy-headed and it takes him a second to remember where he is and what’s going on.

Someone’s walking past- his vision adjusts after a second, and he realizes it’s Burger. He’s carrying someone, and as he carefully sets them down on the bed next to Vang0 he realizes-

“Dasha?” he rasps.  _ Yikes, _ is that his voice? And moreover,  _ yikes,  _ is that actually Dasha? She looks-

well, not great. Dusty, mostly, but also bleeding from a fair few locations, not to mention the fact that her legs don’t really look... much like  _ legs  _ anymore. He averts his eyes quickly.

“Vang0?” Burger says. “You’re- are you-” He looks like he’s about to hug him, but holding back; Vang0 sighs and opens his arms obligingly. The big oaf gives him the tightest hug he’s ever received; he makes an embarrassing noise not unalike to a squeaky toy. “I’m so glad you’re okay, I was so worried about you.”

Ugh. Emotions.

“Yeah, well, y’know, can’t keep Vang0 Bang0 down for long,” he says, with what he hopes is his usual flashy smile as Burger lets go. He drops the smile quickly, though- “What happened to you? What happened to  _ Dasha? _ ”

“Oh, well- after you collapsed we brought you here, then Dasha realized what all had happened to you was because of Talc and was all like, ‘we gotta shut em down,’ and THEN we had to go inside and we were looking for a way up to the top floor but we could only get to floor fifty, so we ended up havin’ ta climb up the side? It was real fun but I think Dasha hated it. Anyway,  _ then  _ we got inside and we met one of Dasha’s friends who was a fixer but also not? Dasha was _real_ mad. An’ then all the computers shut down, so Dasha shot out the glass and we jumped out the window and she used a parachute she had and it was super cool? 

“Anyway then we had to get Lionel and Cherries- that was another person in the basement- and I brought ‘em out and Dasha had a bomb I made but I forgot to put a long ol fuse on it so she set it off and the building kind of came down on her.”

It takes Vang0 a second to filter through all of that information. “The  _ building- _ ?”

“Yuh-huh.”

“That’s-” he does math quick in his head- “500,000 tons. How is she  _ alive? _ ”

“Uh-” he ducks his head. “I’m not really sure? What happened to you, anyway?”

“Uhh, y’know, just- I got- thrown into the netspace, jacked into the Talc servers, and disabled their entire computer program. Turns out they had sleeper agents, like, everywhere in the meatspace? And that I was one of them? So, um, my- cybernetic eye doesn’t really work anymore. And my memories are-” he takes a deep breath “-kind of lost forever.”

“Oh, Vang0, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there,” Burger says, looking stricken, and hugs him again- not as tight but just as strong. Vang0… lets himself be held. He definitely  _ doesn’t  _ wrap his arms over Burger’s shoulders, hugging him back. He _doesn't._

It’s nice. It’s not what he’s used to, but it’s not bad.

\---

We, the viewers, move to a montage-style section.

It’s a week later. Dasha is being helped into a wheelchair that Vang0 stands behind; Burger carrying her there. She says something inaudible but obviously witty (it’s Dasha, of course it is) and Vang0 ducks his head to hide what’s obviously a small smile. Burger throws his head back and laughs wholeheartedly, from his chest into a loud and purely joyful sound.

Vang0 wheels her out and Burger holds the door open, then eagerly climbs into the van to show off what he’s done with the money he had from Gio- the side door slides open and he unfolds a ramp. Dasha looks surprised, but… there’s something else in her expression, too, a sort of softness. She says something, and Burger dips his head and scratches the back of his neck, not going pink but certainly a little bashful.

-

It’s two weeks later and Burger is scrambling over a pile of scrap in the junkyard, tugging a mostly-plain sheet of metal from the bottom and handing it to Vang0, who brings it over to a station he’s set up. He flicks down a visor, pulls on heavy gloves, and then carefully starts heating the metal up to bend it into a smooth, roundish shape. He solders it to another piece to form the beginning of a metal foot. By the end of that day, they have the shape of the left leg mostly down; Burger claps Vang0 on the shoulder, and Vang0 offers a rare, real smile to Burger as they hide the equipment under a tarp. A healthy-looking pigeon alights atop the tarp, but neither notice; it goes to peck at the bird feeder Burger hung up three days ago.

-

A month later, Vang0’s finished a sort of solo-quest thing, effectively a hired “hit” of sorts on a stalker, and it’s with shaky hands that he boots up the brand-new camera drone he was finally able to afford. It blinks on, its camera feed flickering to life on his agent, and he sort of grins at it- not quite his real smile, but not entirely fake either. We see him set something up on his agent and the red light switches to the purple of TwitchII.

He greets chat nonchalantly, even as they go  _ nuts- _ he hasn’t streamed since the fight in the cult shed. Later, a zoomed-in picture of his face is posted to his jumptrash page by another user; the caption reads, “those were some shiny-ass eyes, bang0.”

He doesn’t delete it, just replies with, “you saw nothing. -vb”

-

It’s a month and a half later and Burger is polishing two metal legs, obviously custom-made to fit Dasha. Vang0 is sewing, next to him, a sort of harness to keep them attached; he pokes his own finger with a needle by accident, and swears and shakes his hand aggressively. Burger offers him a band-aid, and he takes it gratefully. That night, Vang0 starts work on the mechanical and cybernetic elements of the leg. He opens a new tab and starts to learn how the nanotechnology works. He types his search query in, with a sparkly pink band-aid adorning his left pointer finger.

-

Four months after the collapse we see Vang0 toss Dasha the legs as she's sitting by her bed, on her agent, and her wheelchair rolls backward a little bit with the weight; she opens her mouth as if to say something angry, but then realizes what they are. “You made these?” she asks.

“Well, the pigeons didn’t,” Vang0 retorts sharply, but he looks away, ears red. “Burger helped. You want to try them out?”

“Hell yeah,” she says. “Give me a hand?”   
  


That afternoon, she tries to stand and stumbles to one knee; Vang0 steps forward as if to give a hand and she pushes his arm aside, then shakily stands and takes one step forward, then another. 

-

Six months after the collapse, they’re having Team Dinner after a successful fetch quest. Burger and Dasha exchange a glance, and she says, “Vang0, we need to tell you something.”

“Okay but I need you to know that is  _ the  _ most terrifying phrase in the world,” Vang0 says.

“Sorry,” Burger says. “It’s just- you remember the Talc thing?”

“How could I  _ forget  _ the Talc thing?” Vang0 says.

“Juno Cybranth, the CEO, tried to make us an offer when we were talking to him,” Dasha says carefully. “He tried to get us to hush about it by giving us a USB with files including your past information.”

Vang0 pauses before raising a slice of synthetic pizza to his mouth and taking a bite. “You know what, I’m over that,” he says. “It’s been six months since I literally watched my past vanish in front of me. And- it doesn’t- that’s not who I am, you know? I’m not Project Vanguard, I’m Vang0 Bang0.”

“If you want, we could… we could try and disable the chip in you?” Burger suggests, and Vang0 makes a tsking noise. Not one of disapproval, just one of... tsking. 

“Uh, yeah, but… I actually checked in with Hypo,” he says, looking a little sheepish despite his usual unconcerned cadence. “And- while it’s safe to take out, it’s already in my code. And I… I flipped that, that permanent switch- the only way to remember would’ve been that file, and- y’know, like I said, I’m over it.”

Dasha’s bracer vibrates and she gives Vang0 a smile as she picks up the call.

“Hi, have I reached Dasha?” a quiet and shy-sounding voice asks.

“Um, yes. What can I help you with?”

“Well- my boyfriend is about to stage a heist, and while that wouldn’t normally be a big deal I work at the casino and I think they’ll try and pin it on me-”

The three of them look at each other, and Vang0 gives a deep, put-upon sigh before shoving the rest of the pizza into his mouth. Dasha gets up and stretches (balancing precariously on one foot to do so,) tosses Burger his shotgun, and they hurry out of the apartment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks, it's been a wild ride. Thanks for sticking with me through it! 
> 
> I've got some plots in the workings for maybe future PCPR fic, but I make no promises :-)
> 
> Despite the fact that the work is complete, your comments and kudos show you care, and they make me a little happier about the work I've produced! Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for future plots- I'd love to hear em :D 
> 
> (You didn't ACTUALLY think I was gonna kill Dasha, did you? Did you??)


End file.
